And the story is here again, in the form of research unveiled this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Solar Physics Division in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
The solar science, described graphically in a Discover Magazine post - "an east/west river of gas" which "flows under the surface of the Sun" that can't be seen directly but which is inferred from "sound waves that travel from it to the surface" - is fascinating.
And what it suggests is that the Sun appears set to quieten further over the next solar cycle than it already has - with lower sunspot activity, and perhaps marginally lower energy output.
But as to the implications on Earth - well, for anyone who's followed this story for a while, they're very familiar, and the telling of them is laced with equally familiar political overtones.
The big question is this: if the predictions of an impending reduction in solar activity turn into reality, what would that mean for the global climate?
And that's why it becomes a political football - because if the answer is that it counteracts global warming, still more if it leads to global cooling, then moves away from fossil fuel use are at best unnecessary and at worst harmful.
The comparator here is the Maunder Minimum - a period of low solar activity running in the late 1600s and early 1700s - a "grand solar minimum" - which co-incided with a period of colder than usual temperatures - at least, in parts of Europe.
So you can probably name a few organisations likely to pounce on this latest work as evidence that another cool period is coming, and that society's logical response is to drill, baby, drill and burn, baby, burn like never before.
The Register doesn't disappoint, suggesting the solar cycle predictions will become "the science story of the century" and mean that the Earth is "heading into a mini Ice Age" - while the Daily Telegraph's James Delingpole treats it as fact - "It's official: a new Ice Age is on its way". As it has been for years, the reality is rather different.
Firstly, the research itself has been presented at one rather small and rather select science meeting - not, as yet, formally published and peer reviewed. Soundings taken by dot.earth's Andy Revkin suggest that not everyone in the solar physics community likes what they've seen - so publication could yet prove a hurdle.
Secondly, the predictions made about the next solar cycle would have to turn into reality - which might not happen, however sound the science. Thirdly, even if all that happens, the Sun's activity would have to diminish enough to overwhelm the man-made contribution to the greenhouse effect.
Four years ago, in the midst of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's last major assessment of global climate and shortly after Henrik Svensmark's The Chilling Stars elaborated how the Earth's modern climate could be determined by solar effects on cosmic rays, I looked into this question for a feature article on this website - part of a series on scientific, social and political aspects of "climate scepticism".